Nick Hundley: Sound mind, sound knee, sound sleeper

In an at bat that typified the struggles he had at the plate last year, Nick Hundley strikes out on a high fastball at Houston, the kind of plate appearance that the Padres catcher has worked technically and mentally to put behind him in 2013. (AP Photo/Pat Sullivan)
— AP

In an at bat that typified the struggles he had at the plate last year, Nick Hundley strikes out on a high fastball at Houston, the kind of plate appearance that the Padres catcher has worked technically and mentally to put behind him in 2013. (AP Photo/Pat Sullivan)
/ AP

PEORIA, Ariz.  Nick Hundley was trying to be neither ironic nor flippant, for there was nothing remotely amusing about what he went through last year.

Hundley did, however, refer to one early morning in May as his “wakeup call.” The twist being, things had gotten so excruciatingly bad by that point, there was no way he was going to sleep.

Sixty games into the 2012 season, the Padres literally were at their absolute lowest, 19 games out of first place. Not coincidentally, their catcher was at wit’s end.

“I’m alone in a Milwaukee hotel room, it’s five a.m., I’m still wide awake and staring at the walls,” said Hundley. “I’m asking myself questions: What am I doing? How did I mess up this bad? How did I let my career get to this point?’ “

Nine months later, Hundley thinks he has his mind right and the body healed, his problematic knee fixed with offseason surgery and his hitting approach vastly improved. Hundley’s been one of the Padres’ most impressive hitters in Cactus League play, driving the ball into the gaps, occasionally launching them with authority over the left-field wall.

Whether real or just a spring thing, this is the Nick Hundley the Padres needed to see, given the extremely crucial nature of the catcher position to the Padres in the upcoming season, the 50-game suspension to be served by Yasmani Grandal for his failed drug test and the major question of whether Hundley can rebound from his own summer of despair. On the latter matter, he votes yes.

“I had the best offseason of my life, by far," Hundley said. "I changed up a lot of things about my training and preparation and mental approach, changed a lot of things up about my swing. Im just excited about the opportunity to play again.

"You realize how you miss it when its taken away from you. Looking back, though, I'm glad I went through it.“

"It" being 2012. "It" being a supreme test of everything Hundley feels he represents, the difficulty of dealing with abject failure. "It" being that scene in a Milwaukee hotel room.

“I’ll remember that for the rest of my life,” said Hundley. “Man. Tough night.”

Tough, tough year.

Admittedly given every opportunity to succeed by a club desperate to get him back to his 2011 form and firm up his status as the Padres catcher for years to come, Hundley basically did a 180-degree turn and kept on going backwards. Batting .166 when suffering the indignity of a return to Triple-A Tucson on June 30, he got a few more major league at bats in August, whereupon his average slipped further to .157.

Exacerbating all this – and perhaps causing some of it – was the fact that Hundley had been given a contract extension last spring by a Padres club trying to make a statement about keeping its best young players around. Judging from the amount of sawdust at his feet from squeezing the bat so tightly at the plate, Hundley seemed to be trying to earn the entire $9 million with every pitch to him.